Moyes and West Ham put the seal on a brilliant if puzzling 2023 with victory at profligate Arsenal

Dave Tickner
Tomas Soucek opens the scoring at the Emirates
Tomas Soucek opens the scoring at the Emirates

Been quite a year for West Ham all told, hasn’t it?

The Hammers began 2023 one place and one point above the Premier League relegation zone, with manager David Moyes’ job under serious pressure. They end it a trophy in the cabinet and a place in the top six after a hard-fought 2-0 win at Arsenal, and with manager David Moyes’ job under serious pressure.

A perplexing team in many ways – it’s only a couple of weeks, for instance, since they were getting spangled 5-0 at Fulham – but one where the good days currently significantly outnumber the bad. It’s now five wins in the last seven in all competitions for West Ham, with the other two being that defeat at the Cottage and the 5-1 Carabao surrender from a second-string side at Anfield. There remains a pretty widespread assumption that Moyes is unlikely to remain in place beyond the summer and the end of his current contract. But also at the moment a pretty valid question about what more, precisely, a West Ham manager might be expected to deliver.

There’s no point pretending there wasn’t some luck ridden along the way here, but few wins at the Emirates these days are going to arrive without at least some share of good fortune. And what West Ham did beautifully was ensure they secured themselves full value for that good fortune.

The likelihood is that the ball did in fact go out of play in the build-up to their first goal. Certainly it looked more like it than the goal at Newcastle that sent Mikel Arteta off the deep end. But it was still hard to convincingly argue that the replays offered anything entirely conclusive that should override the on-field decision. Here football suffers a similar problem to that seen time and time again with low catches in cricket where your instincts tell you one thing but the flat pictures of a 3D world aren’t quite able to confirm it. And sometimes the fire really is just some orange netting.

But yes, Arsenal can probably consider themselves unfortunate for that one.

It doesn’t really excuse the rest of what happened here, though. It wasn’t great from a team with eyes on the big prize and the chance to reclaim top spot. There’s inevitably some outcome bias here as there always is on nights like this – Arsenal can, will and have created far less than this and won said games pretty comfortably – but even so: not great. West Ham’s defensive organisation and commitment to the task were exemplary, but the lack of inspiration from Arsenal’s frontline was maddening. Martin Odegaard tried and tried to make something happen, but found himself either banging into a brick wall of West Ham defenders, or seeking one out to vent his frustration after another misstep from those in front of him.

Noting Arsenal’s lack of a thoroughbred goalscorer is neither new nor profound, but these are the nights where it really does hurt them. It really will be interesting to see what January brings, because it does need something. On these nights where the opposition is willing and the inspiration lacking, Arsenal can look quite toothless and even unimaginative. And that’s all the more frustrating when they are so close to being something truly special.

West Ham’s second goal was a body blow, delivered by former Gunner Konstantinos Mavropanos. He just about remembered to mute his celebration, but the ear-to-ear grin rather gave the game away. It was, therefore, just about the perfect muted celebration, managing to celebrate while still being respectful to his former team. We still say give us the full Adebayor every time, though.

Arsenal may have been unfortunate to be 2-0 down, but their response was deeply uninspiring. Gabriel Jesus headed wide from the one clear chance they did create, because of course he did, while other than that a great deal of time and effort was spent sending crosses into the box to be comfortably dealt with by assorted large West Ham defenders. Given the teams’ respective strengths and weaknesses, this wasn’t a play out of the ‘do what your opponent wants least’ school from Arsenal but nor was it ‘do what you want most’. From the outside looking in, it was perplexing to watch.

Which again can only be to West Ham’s credit. There can be no way Arsenal really wanted to take this approach to trying to recover the situation but West Ham offered no alternative.

Dare we say it, this was a night when David Moyes got his tactics spot on, rode his luck when it presented itself and capitalised fully. Moyes can look back on 2023 as the year he got his hands on a piece of silverware and then spent the last month shuffling into the top six with victories over Spurs, West Ham and Arsenal.

And we’ll almost certainly still have him leaving the club in our 2024 predictions.